This small Alaska town is swamped by cruise ship visitors every summer. But what happens when they all go home?

Skagway’s 1,100 permanent residents are caught between a boom time – when the ships bring more than a million tourists – and a lull in winter

October comes to the small Alaska coastal town of Skagway like a sigh. The shops that were bustling throughout the crazed tourist season are reducing their opening hours or beginning to close. The hordes of employees sleeping in overcrowded bunkhouses are leaving or have left.

The crowds of cruise passengers who have filled the streets since April, wearing lanyards emblazoned with the names of their ships, have dwindled to a trickle. Soon, they will all be gone. Snow is visible on the nearby mountains.